Outline

Aims/hypothesis: Recently, several genome-wide association (GWA) studies have robustly identified novel single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) related to type 2 diabetes (T2D). Several other studies using non-invasive electron-beam computed tomography, a method for the detection and quantification of coronary artery calcification (CAC), have found a higher CAC burden in participants with T2D. The aim of our study is to investigate the combined effect of the T2D SNPs and CAC for prevalent T2D cases in comparison with T2D-free controls in an unselected population-based cohort from Germany.

Conclusions: We confirm that genetic variants in IGF2BP2, TCF7L2, CDKAL1 and SLC30A8 are associated with T2D. Our result is in agreement with other studies; additionally our study is the first to show these effects separately for males and females. Furthermore, the estimators (ORs) for the genetic effects for T2D risk with involvement of CAC hardly changes, implying that these genetic variants are largely independent of CAC.